Mandy hoped that Ashleigh would come to Rae and Alex in their dreams like her mother, Sal, came to her, surrounded by flowers in a garden that spread to the horizon. Mandy didn’t believe in heaven or hell, in an afterlife. The dead only lived in our memories and dreams. And there, they could live forever.
Chapter 30
Antonello changed three times. First a suit: the navy blue one he’d worn to Ashleigh’s funeral. But the suit smelt of incense and grief, and in the pocket of the jacket, folded and refolded, he found his eulogy notes and the sketches of Ashleigh. He took the suit off and shoved it far back into the wardrobe.
‘That’s the suit I want them to bury me in,’ he said to his reflection in the mirror. An old man — sagging skin, thinning hair — stared back at him. ‘You’re not dead yet. Not quite.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Paolina called out from the kitchen.
‘No one,’ he called back.
‘First sign of madness,’ she responded.
When he came out of the bedroom in blue jeans and a striped shirt he’d owned for two decades, she sent him back to get changed again.
‘Well, what should I wear?’ he asked her, even though he hated those stories about useless men who didn’t know how to get dressed without their wives. Paolina struggled to her feet. The last bout of chemo had pounded her like hail on a rickety shack; she was the ruin of her former self. Her hair had fallen out for a second time, and her skin hung loose on her brittle bones everywhere except around her belly and legs, where fluid had built up and refused to shift. I’ve become a camel, she’d said to her oncologist, storing water as if I’m heading into the desert. She was due back in hospital so they could drain it, but she was determined to attend the memorial. She picked out black jeans and an almost new green shirt for Antonello. They both took jackets. There was a cover of dark cloud across the sky, and Paolina said she could smell rain.
‘It’s cold, Paolina. You should stay home.’
‘Are you worried some old girlfriend might turn up and I’ll cramp your style?’ She smiled and winked and Antonello shrugged, pointing to his pot belly and pulling at the loose skin under his chin.
‘Sure, they’ll be lining up to get their hands on me,’ he said and then moved closer to her, kissing her lightly on the lips. ‘Button up your coat, bella mia.’
By the time they arrived, there were several hundred people under the bridge. Mostly men, mostly unionists, wearing badges and t-shirts and windcheaters with slogans: Putting workers first; We bridge the gap; Stronger together; Dare to struggle, dare to win. Some of the workers were wearing safety jackets; in the crowd, they created rivers of yellow and green. There were union banners and TV cameras. Forty years was a long time, and young men were old, but some faces were so familiar, it seemed impossible all those years had passed. He recognised them, the weathered outdoor men who’d been his workmates. They recognised him. A smile. A nod. A slap on the back. Men moved across the crowd to stand by him, next to him. They called him Nello, and he was surprised they remembered, but then their names slipped off his tongue as if he’d seen them the day before. Dennis, Angelo, Steve… a tight pulley was winching him back to the young Antonello, a twenty-two-year-old rigger, a boy, agile, smooth-skinned, carefree; a man with mates who called him Nello, with workmates who called him dago and wog, and whom he called bludgers and racist shits. But no matter what they said, no matter what arguments and disagreements they had, when they were working up high, they looked out for one another. And all of them, all those men, stayed on the site for days after the collapse, digging in the mud, hammering at steel and concrete, using welders and jackhammers and cranes, all of them searching for the bodies of their mates. The grip of their handshake, his reflection in their eyes, time so elastic that Antonello wasn’t sure he could keep himself upright.
He was looking for Sam when Paolina pointed to Alice, but Antonello would’ve recognised her anywhere. She was talking and laughing, and a circle had already formed around her.
‘Alice comes every year to every memorial, to be with Sam. She lives up north with her second husband and her children,’ Paolina said.
‘How do you know?’
Paolina grinned. Of course: Paolina and Alice had kept in contact all those years. He didn’t know. How many other things didn’t he know about his wife? How many things that Paolina hadn’t told him? He was thinking about this, and about the short time they had left together, when he was distracted by a reporter interviewing a man standing behind him. The man was in his sixties, tall and solid, flanked on either side by his sons. He was familiar, but Antonello could not remember his name. The likeness between the father and sons was unmistakable. Both of the younger men had his build, but it was the eyes that were distinctive: three sets of bulging brown eyes, set in hollow sockets, under thick dark eyebrows.
‘Do you think about the collapse?’ the reporter asked.
The son standing on his left answered, ‘My father wakes up screaming some nights.’
The father put his arm around his son’s shoulder. The son, in his early forties, would’ve been a toddler at the time of the collapse. Antonello remembered him. Des. He had been a boilermaker.
‘A few bad nightmares,’ the father said to the reporter, ‘but I got off lightly. I saw my sons grow up.’
‘Nello,’ Sam called out to him, and they walked through the crowd to where he was standing talking to a woman also in her sixties. Her grey hair was set in a style that reminded Antonello of his mother and of the Queen Mother. ‘Mick’s wife,’ Sam said, motioning to Antonello. ‘Rosa was widowed at twenty.’
‘I don’t remember you, but then I didn’t meet many of Mick’s workmates before the accident. He loved this bridge. He used to say, “Wait until it’s finished, and then we’re going to drive over it, all of us, with the kids.”’ There was no bitterness in her voice. ‘I wish,’ she said, ‘that he’d seen his children grow up. He loved his girls so much.’ She pointed to three women standing behind her. One of them wearing a union logo, the same logo worn by Des’s sons. Bridge builders breed unionists, Antonello thought.
The speeches were heartfelt and respectful, but for Antonello the references to the bridge as a monument to the workers who died was difficult to listen to. The bridge wasn’t their legacy. For survivors like Sam, who took the tragedy and fought to improve safety, the legacy was a safer future for working men and women, tougher laws, and harsher punishments to stop employers taking shortcuts with workers’ lives. That was a legacy he could stand behind. Not a bridge.
‘Never again,’ the crowd shouted after one of the speeches.
Sam hadn’t let his nightmares define his life. Sam had joined together with other survivors and made a difference.
‘Never trust the bosses again,’ one of the other speakers said. ‘That was the lesson. That’s our motto.’
The last speaker read out the names of the thirty-five dead. Men took off their beanies. The crowd bowed their heads.
Sarah arrived at the bridge after the speeches were over, and the crowd was thinning. She stood in front of the memorial. The wreaths and bouquets laid out by the mourners created a tiny carpet of colour under the mammoth bridge.
She walked towards Williamstown on the path that ran alongside a row of grey and red stone pillars, a sculptural installation. Each pillar was slightly different. Each represented one of the men who’d lost their lives. Sarah ran her hand over the surface of one of the pillars. Overhead, drivers kept driving. There was no stopping on the bridge, except for emergencies. She supposed that for Ada life had been unbearable, death an urgent desire.